Israel bans Quaker American Friends Service Committee, the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize winners for Rescuing Jews from Nazi Germany

However Israel Extends a Welcoming Hand to Neo-Nazi & Far Right Leaders

It is one of life’s ironies that if you are a neo-Nazi and you deny that the Holocaust occurred, then you are more than welcome to enter Israel, pay homage to the dead you deny at Yad Vashem, meet government ministers and profess your joint hatred of Muslims.  However if you are Jewish and believe that Boycotting Israel is the best way to change its Apartheid economic and society then you are banned.

This is what Israel has come to.  Anti-racists are banned but racists, fascists and neo-Nazis are more than welcome.  People like Heinz Christian-Strache of Austria, who was a guest of Likud recently.  Or Geert Wilders, the Dutch bigot and parliamentarian or even Richard ‘White Zionist’ Spencer the neo-Nazi alt-Right leader. 

All of the above are welcome in Israel BUT Rebecca Vilkomerson, the leader of Jewish Voices for Peace in the United States is NOT welcome.

Israel is one of the few countries in the world who ban people not for what they do but what they think.  It is ironic that it must be the only country in the world to welcome neo-Nazis but ban the ‘wrong sort of Jews’ from entering.  I guess that is why it calls itself a ‘Jewish’ state.

Here is the list of 20 groups that have been banned – two – Palestine Solidarity Campaign and War on Want are from Britain.

Tony Greenstein 

Rebecca Vilkomerson (right) Director of Jewish Voices for Peace is now banned from Israel

Banned Groups

Europe

• AFPS (France-Palestine Solidarity Association)
• BDS France
• BDS Italy
• ECCP (The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine)
• FOA (Friends of al-Aqsa)
• IPSC (Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign)
• Norge Palestinakomitee (The Palestine Committee of Norway)
• Palestinagrupperna i Sverige (PGS-Palestine Solidarity Association of Sweden)
• PSC (Palestine Solidarity Campaign)
• War on Want
• BDS Kampagne

United States

• AFSC (American Friends Service Committee)
• AMP (American Muslims for Palestine)
• Code Pink
• JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace)
• NSJP (National Students for Justice in Palestine)
• USCPR (U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights)

Other groups

• BDS Chile
• BDS South Africa
• BDS National Committee

Not banned - Herr Strache of the Austrian   Freedom Party visits  Yad Vashem

Quaker group honored by Yad Vashem for helping Jews during Holocaust is now banned from Israel

Philip Weiss on January 8, 2018

AFSC logo

One of the special ironies of the weekend’s news that Israel is barring 20 international organizations from entry because they support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) is the appearance on that list of the venerable American Friends Service Committee, or AFSC, which was founded 101 years ago as an antiwar organization.

AFSC earned distinction and a Nobel Prize for helping Jews and other refugees escape the Holocaust. Now it is on that list because it is helping Palestinians!

AFSC is honored at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem. From Yad Vashem’s portrait of the American Friends Service Committee:

Relief organization established in 1917 by the Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, as a forum for doing service to humanity in a moral fashion. The Quakers make up one of the smallest religious groups in the United States.

The Foreign Service Section of the AFSC did even more than the Refugee Division. Cooperating with Jewish relief agencies, in 1939 the organization sent a delegation to Germany to check on the situation of Jews and Christians and provide relief if necessary. They mainly assisted Christian refugees, but they also helped Jews. Among other activities, they fed and saved children in France, assisted Jews who had reached Portugal, and organized the activities of relief agencies in Spain.

In 1947 the AFSC won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping refugees during and after World War II.

Mike Merryman-Lotze of the AFSC was quoted today by IMEU on the move by Israel:

Geert Vilders, Dutch Fascist leader lived in Tel Aviv

“We will continue to stand up for peace and justice in Israel and Palestine regardless of the recent Israeli announcement that staff from AFSC and 19 other organizations may be denied entry to Israel because of our support for the grassroots Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for Palestinian human rights. 

“Our response to the Palestinian BDS call is in line with our similar support for divestment from apartheid South Africa and boycotts during the civil rights era. Our work is motivated by Quaker belief in the worth and dignity of all people, and it is that belief that has led us to support and join in nonviolent resistance to violence and oppression around the world, including the Palestinian BDS call, for a hundred years.”

Thanks to Ofer Neiman and Eitan Diamond. Oh and Haaretz also did the story. And thanks to Mondo’s co-editor Adam Horowitz– who used to do Palestinian work at AFSC.

Yad Vashem page on the American Friends Services Committee role during the War

P.S. This story feeds my spiritual understanding that Palestinians are being forced by Israel to recapitulate the history of the Jews. What we experienced in Europe, Palestinians must experience in Israel and Palestine. This time around we play the guys with the jack boots! Of course there is a big arc in that story; the group goes from being humiliated outsiders to people granted prestige by the world for their suffering. Palestinians are gaining prestige by the moment. AFSC is surely proud of being named.

Palestinian American Boy Beaten Up by Israeli Police Testifies at Congressional Meeting

Abukhdeir is the cousin of Muhammad  Abu Khudair, who was burnt alive by Israeli settlers last year in Jerusalem.  They poured petroleum down his throat and set him alight in an action whose barbarity recalls that of Isis and the Jordanian pilot.

So far Israel seems to have done nothing about his murderers, who will almost certainly receive a light sentence.  Israeli Police have already tried to suggest that Abu Khudair was killed by his own family as some kind of ‘honour’ killing.

Abukhdeir, who is an American citizen, was viciously beaten up by the Israeli Police and but for his US citizenship would still be languishing in an Israeli prison accused, no doubt, having attacked his attackers.

There are two videos below recording the meeting held at the US Congress.

Tony Greenstein

Israeli Police Thugs Beat Up a Child - noone has paid

 Palestinian American teen recounts Israeli assault to packed room on Capitol Hill

Nora Barrows-Friedman The Electronic Intifada Podcast 11 June 2015

“If there wasn’t a video of me, I would be in jail and no one would believe what they did to me,” Palestinian American Tariq Abukhdeir, 16, stated during a US congressional briefing in Washington, DC on 2 June.

In July 2014, Abukhdeir was beaten unconscious by Israeli police in Shufat, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. The vicious assault was captured on video.

After attacking him, Israeli forces arrested and detained Abukhdeir and five other youths without charge. Police prevented Abukhdeir from receiving medical treatment for five hours. Abukhdeir’s cousin, Muhammad Abu Khudair, 16, was kidnapped and burned alive by Israeli extremists just days before.

“Where are these soldiers now? Are they doing this to another Palestinian child? I want to go back this summer and be with my family and put this behind me,” the teenager told a packed room in the US capitol nearly a year after he was beaten. ”But I know that for me to put this behind me, these soldiers have to be held accountable.”

Abukhdeir’s testimony at the congressional briefing was part of a three-day series of advocacy events in early June organized by Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCI-Palestine), the American Friends Service Committee and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation to raise awareness of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinian children in military detention. More than 100 people, including staff from 36 congressional offices, attended the briefing.

Visibly upset

Brad Parker, attorney and advocacy officer with DCI-Palestine, accompanied Abukhdeir and his family to the congressional briefing along with Jennifer Bing, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Middle East Program in Chicago. The rights groups are part of the No Way to Treat a Child campaign, which includes a broad coalition of groups.

Abukhdeir’s highly visible case helped bring attention to the plight of countless other Palestinian children in Israeli military detention who aren’t afforded access to the US State Department, which helped procure the Florida teen’s release from Israeli detention last summer.

The campaign aims to “target our own members of Congress, raise the issue, make it local and get people involved in demanding respect for Palestinian children’s rights,” Parker said.

Many government staffers were shocked to hear the specifics of Israel’s violations of children’s rights.

“You could see them visibly becoming upset,” Bing said, “as Brad [Parker] in particular was able to share with them the process of what happens during night raids, the kind of interrogations, the impact that it has on families.”

Part of a video series of the briefing is below, featuring Brad Parker, Tariq Abukhdeir and his mother Suha Abukhdeir.

Thousands of children arrested

DCI-Palestine states that “Israel is the only country in the world that automatically prosecutes children in military courts that lack basic and fundamental fair trial guarantees. Since 2000, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in an Israeli military detention system notorious for the systematic ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children.”

Last summer, more than 550 children were killed during Israel’s 51-day attack on the Gaza Strip.

Yet, as The Electronic Intifada reported this week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon caved in to pressure from Israel and the US and removed the Israeli military from its list of serious violators of children’s rights in an annual report on children in armed conflict.

DCI-Palestine’s Parker said that he sees opportunities for further discussions between Palestinian children’s advocates and Washington policymakers.

“We’re embarking on an incremental approach to engaging on an issue with specific policymakers who aren’t necessarily predisposed to being sympathetic to the issue, or regularly interested in actually pursuing anything related to the issue,” he said.

Following the congressional briefing, Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota wrote a “dear colleague” letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry, calling on him to make the “human rights of Palestinian children a priority in our bilateral relationship with the State of Israel.”

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has launched an online drive to urge other members of congress to sign McCollum’s letter.